Is there such a thing as bisexual art?

And if so, what might it look like?

After yesterday’s newsletter, in which I briefly touched on The White Lotus as a way to kick off a conversation about where “gay for pay” exists in the spectrum of bi identity (spoiler alert: sometimes it’s secret bisexuality!), I found myself thinking more about, well, The White Lotus, and specifically what it means for this show — this brutal satire of rich people and their entitlements and self sabotage — to be created by a bisexual man, and whether that alone is enough to qualify The White Lotus as “bisexual art.” And if not, well — what is bisexual art? What are its qualities? Is it possible to enumerate them? Do we know it when we see it?

I’m (obviously) going to go more into depth here, but as a starting point I will say that no, I don’t think that all art created by bisexual people is inherently bisexual art. But I do think that The White Lotus itself can rightly be considered bisexual art — even though there are no characters who explicitly identify as bisexual within the work.

So, what do I mean by that?

Back when I was writing my first book (#BuyMyBook), it occurred to me at one point that this was the kind of book that could only be written about by a bisexual woman. If you’re not intimately familiar with my entire oeuvre, then you should know as a baseline that my book — Faking It: The Lies Women Tell About Sex — And the Truths They Reveal — is an intimate look at how society constructs the idea of who and what a woman is, and how women are often forced to either fudge the truth to match this arbitrary idea of “real” womanhood, or endure punishment for simply being themselves. I wrote about faking orgasm and wearing make up and lying about one’s sexual history as examples of ways that women obfuscate in order to live up to society’s (and often men’s) expectations of womanhood.

And the reason why this book felt so bisexual to me was not simply because it examined the experiences of women from a diverse range of sexual backgrounds, or because it looked at how this artificial idea of womanhood manifests in both queer and straight relationships, but because the very understanding I have of what it is to be a woman, and how womanhood works, required me to be both an insider and an outsider, to perpetually be observing my surroundings with a degree of detachment even as I am right inside the house.

That, to me, feels very bisexual: I understand what it is to date men as a woman because I date men as a woman, and yet unlike straight women I have the ability to step outside the experience, to see outside myself. I’m similarly not married to this idea that queerness is itself some utopian salvation, and can critically witness how it is constructed in a way that many monosexual queers are, themselves, unable to do. All of this informs my understanding of what it is to be a woman navigating sex and dating, and all of this was crucial to the perspective that ultimately crafted the argument at the spine of my book.

That’s also how I think about bisexual art. To me, it’s not a question of whether there are bisexual people in it or not: art can prominently feature bisexuals characters while not really being bisexual (Brooklyn 99 falls into this category for me); it can also have no explicitly bisexual characters and yet embody this spirit, this curiosity and questioning, and thus be extremely bisexual (I feel like a lot of The Lonely Island’s work actually fits here, which I’ll have to go into detail on another day*). It’s the way that we can recognize that a movie is queer even when it’s populated entirely by straight people — that’s what I mean when I say that something is bisexual art.

Which brings me back to The White Lotus. Yes, it’s a show created by a bisexual man**, and yes, it’s a show where queer characters exist among straight ones, where bisexuality certainly seems to be in the air even if no one ever comes out and says, “Hello, it’s me, the bi one.” All of that is part of the bisexuality of The White Lotus, to be sure.

But I think there’s something deeper, too. The show is obsessed with power dynamics and how people — especially the wealthy tourists vacationing at White Lotus resorts and the staff who accommodate them — navigate them. And in its second season, it’s particularly obsessed with gender and sex. The Di Grasso family is three generations of men whose toxic relationship to both women and their own masculinity feels like a portrait that could never be painted by a straight man — and yet might feel less grounded, more detached, if it were created by a gay man. The passive aggressive feud between the Spillers and the Sullivans is a study in both hetero and homoeroticism, with every character in the mix feeding off the sexual energy that fuels their conflicts. And then, of course, we’ve got Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya, the “muse” of the whole series and the only character to appear in both seasons of the show. Need it be said that Jennifer Coolidge — the MILF of American Pie fame grown into a tragic femme heroine — has been an object of obsession for both straight and gay men, albeit through different lenses? I dunno, seems pretty bi to me!

This is, of course, a new line of inquiry for me, and something I literally just started thinking about this morning. But I think it’s a fascinating one; something I would love to think more about (truly, gonna wind up writing a whole thing about The Lonely Island and bisexuality at some point, I promise). But for now: what works do you personally consider to be bisexual art? Leave them in the comments, I want to know (and possibly check them out!).

* #TheLonelyBiland

** Bisexual King™️ Mike White